Trump’s Not Putin; He’s Mohamed Morsi

“It wasn’t enough to justify a vote for Trump on my part, but it did cause me to abstain, as I saw them both as poisonous.”
I have been thinking about this particular stance of yours in the context of the very same passage from Dante’s Inferno for months now.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would often roam the dilapidated streets of the small (Bohemian) town where I was growing up. Sometimes the adults would yell at us for being a pain, and sometimes we would yell back: “what were you doing in ’48?!?” What we were saying to them (without really understanding it) was: “where is your moral high ground now, eh? You have none!” Many of those quite decent people chose not to participate in the political circus of 1947 and 1948. That helped the communists win fairly democratic elections and forced the president to name a communist prime minister.

There still was a chance. A Czech version of gen. Pinochet was on offer. Instead, the non-communist members of the government found it morally unacceptable and decided to resign. A few months later the president was dead, and the very same people found themselves occupying much lower grounds scraping uranium ore from mineshaft walls with teaspoons.

The Benedict Option did not work out well either. Religious orders were rounded up and sent to the same mines or gulags. Faith-based groups were dispersed and punished severely. Would I have preferred a Pinochet to the total social and economic, generations-long devastation? Absolutely.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that perhaps making a pact with the devil is sometimes the moral thing to do.

Well, I would have too, and had the choice been between communism or Trump (or an American Pinochet), I would have had no qualms about voting Trump. That wasn’t the case, not remotely. I mean, I agree with the reader’s point that in politics, sometimes you do have to make a pact with the devil. I’m not convinced that 2016 was one of those times. Besides, as I’ve said here, my withholding my vote was ultimately an act of vanity; Trump won my home state easily, meaning my anti-Trump vote, had I cast one, would have been meaningless. Had I lived in a swing state, I am pretty sure I would have been compelled by conscience to have voted one way or another.

Still, let me say again: the reader is right about politics sometimes putting you in a position in which you have to choose one evil to avoid a worse evil (though I think to call Trump or H. Clinton “evil” is to devalue the term). What bothers we about the way establishment Washington (of both parties) is resisting Trump is what looks to me like failure on its part to understand why the electorate had lost so much faith in it that it voted for a man like Donald Trump as the lesser evil.

On the other side, it is becoming clear that Trump’s administrative and political incompetence is going to cost us all. Ross Douthat has a good column today talking about how populism in power often fails to deliver, because the things that made it work on the campaign trail puts it at a disadvantage at governing. Excerpt:

Second, having campaigned against elites and experts and all their pomps and works, populists imagine that their zeal can carry all before it, that proceduralism and institutional knowledge are for losers and toadies and men with soft hands, and that a few guys in the White House can execute a major overhaul of a delicate system without bureaucratic patience or rhetorical finesse.

This assumption is deeply mistaken, for reasons evident this weekend — in the chaotic scenes at airports, the spectacle of people already in transit being turned away, the crazy attempt to apply the ban to permanent residents, the absence of obvious carve-outs and exceptions, the failure to get adequate buy-in or advice from cabinet officials, and the blowback from Trump’s political allies as well as his opponents.

Then, finally, because populism thrives on its willingness to shatter norms, it tends to treat this chaos and blowback as a kind of vindication — a sign that it’s on the right track, that its boldness is meeting inevitable resistance from the failed orthodoxies of the past, and so on through a self-comforting litany. That makes it hard for populists to course correct, because they get stuck in a “the worse the better” loop, reassuring themselves that they’re making progress when actually they’re cratering.

Read the whole thing. Douthat says that Trump has not shown either the popularity or the political skill to be an American Putin. Rather, he looks more like the hapless Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was elected president of Egypt, but who was so administratively incompetent and politically maladroit that he provoked a coup. Douthat does not predict a coup for the US, but he does predict that Trump’s tenure will be ineffective, in part because he will have alienated the people in both Congress and in the bureaucracy who are needed to make the trains run on time.

Nobody knows yet what’s going to happen. We are in uncharted territory. One danger that conservatives face is that Trump’s blunders will call forth a massive reaction from the left — remember, Trump really did lose the popular vote — and bring to power Democrats who are ideologically fired up and eager to punish. In other words, we wouldn’t be looking at a restoration of establishment governance in terms of restoring the status quo, but a relative radicalization of the establishment. If I were a liberal Democrat, I would want nothing to do with anything Clintonian; I would be demanding stronger stuff.

The danger the Democrats face is that their party will rally behind a Jeremy Corbyn figure. The danger the rest of us face is that their party will rally behind an American Hugo Chavez. To be sure, I don’t think American political culture can produce a Hugo Chavez, or a right-wing counterpart. But a year ago, I didn’t think Donald Trump would be our president, so what do I know?

Here’s a prediction, based on my early reading of René Girard’s work. If Trump continues on this path of antagonism and incompetence, social divisions will intensify. We will either come apart, or we will unite around scapegoating Trump. We will agree that he is responsible for our problems, and that only by ridding ourselves of him and those associated with him can we restore the peace. Whether or not this is true, this will be the story most of us agree on, because the alternative is communal disintegration. And Evangelical Christians, for whom the left has particular contempt (and who are unbeloved by elite Republicans), will be scapegoated along with Trump, whom they embraced as their champion.

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80 Responses to Trump’s Not Putin; He’s Mohamed Morsi

Danger to the Democrats, I mean; Corbyn has been a catastrophe for Labour. — RD]

In terms of Keith Ellison, the US left is a lot less focused economically but a lot more focused on minority rights. (Remember Trump ran certain issues like Richard Gephartdt versus HRC.) And given Trump is going hard against Muslim rights, my guess Keith Ellison becomes the go to guy for the Sunday political shows. Additionally, he is a good speaker, from the Midwest and got the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren approval (for a Chairperson). The analogy could work as long as you accept the US left is not as economically focused. I don’t think Ellison is a Looney as Corbyn but there are obvious reasons for the analogy here.

I was in Turkey in 2007 when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was coming to power. There were massive protests in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. The whole city was red with Turkish flags to show defiance.

I had a class that consisted of three Turks who were secular Kemalists, and three who were AKP supporters. All were nice guys and could, and did, discuss politics calmly.

I mentioned the anti-AKP demonstrations once. One of the pro-AKP guys looked at me and said “”What’s a protest of 50 thousand mean in a country of 70 million?”

AKP went on to win the election.

If we MUST look abroad for figure to explain Trump I’d place my bet on Erdogan. Erdoğan has managed to remain in power not only in spite of being despised by much of the educated class in Turkey, but at times because of that. Despite years of chipping way at the rights of his opponents and at times clownish behavior, he is still there.

“Incompetence” is a weasel word. This is not incompetence. This is deliberate cruelty. If not, then you need to explain why not. You need to deal with the views of your colleagues, like Daniel Larison.

How is handcuffing a 5-year old boy who is a US citizen for hours “incompetence”?

How is preventing a US citizen’s sick mother, who is a green card holder, from entering to get life-saving medical treatment–and then sending her back to Iraq, where she soon died–mere incompetence?

Locking up green card holders, and forcing them to sign documents they don’t understand giving up their legal rights, by telling them they would otherwise be removed from the US and not allowed to return for 5 years, all without being allowed to see an attorney? Forcing them to fly at their own expense to a third country where their passports are then seized?

That’s pretty well planned out to be a result of f***ing incompetence.

Trump acts like a CEO, who considers that a quick, possibly imperfect action is better than a late, possibly better action. Those who voted for him expected him to be a man of action.
Putin had time to build popularity and political skills – he did not have to deal with the combined opposition of political establishment and the media.
Based on his short political track record (in one year, he basically hijacked the Republican party), Trump is highly intelligent and a quick learner.
He is a pragmatist and comparing him to Morsi is at least disingenuous.
Let’s give him some time.

Fran Macadam: “I for one am finding the propensity to make of Trump someone other than himself, searching for some negative world figure to identify him as, a kind of intellectually lazy pigeonholing, ultimately not of much more use than name calling. None of that so far has held water and been revealing.”

Right on point. Trump is Hitler, Trump is Stalin, Trump is Putin, Trump is Voldemort, Trump is Sauron, Trump is Loki, Trump is Bane. These assignations are always accompanied by some stupid gif, meme, or link to a youtube video.

Ross Douthat is akin to a pampered, well fed, well groomed, Siamese cat. No one really expects it to guard the house. And it cannot really survive in the naked wilderness or cold streets. An it will not survive a fight with a feral cat or stray dog.

Douthat will always bring his utopian ideals and literary allusions to to a gun fight. While the left is demolishing Western Civilization here and in Europe he’ll be well-armed with something handy from Batman, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or Star Wars.

In my corner of the universe, no one is protesting, no one is in the streets. They’re too busy getting their kids to school and going to work. I live in a working-class neighborhood where I’m pretty sure 60-75 percent of the residents voted for Trump.

The idea – fed by both the legacy media and social media – that “America” is outraged by Trump is way off. In particular, social media is not America. Journalists look at their feeds – populated by people who believe largely as they do – and they conclude that this is what the country as a whole thinks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And yet, this is the operating thesis of the left; that “#resist” is resounding in the dining rooms of neighborhoods like my own across the land.

You would be more persuasive if you waited at least a month before you started calling Trump incompetent.

First, he is getting his feet wet, and beginner’s mistakes are not the same as incompetence.

Second, if you jump on the “Trump is incompetent” meme the first week, it makes it sounds like you came to that conclusion prior to his taking office, which undermines your credibility with your readers.

I get that you were thick with the Neo-Cons and bought all the W corn. I get that you are friends with some of these Establishment Con people, and they are probably nice people, and you don’t want to say bad things about them. Also, many of the Trumpsters are not especially nice people, so it is easy to say bad things about them. However, please try to be more objective.

We don’t live in normal times. Trump is not like Goldwater, because while Goldwater transformed the GOP, Goldwater lost badly. Trump is a winner who is simultaneously transforming the Party. The Old Establishment, and their ideas, are dead. We need to see the world clearly as it is, not as we would like it.

Douthat will always bring his utopian ideals and literary allusions to to a gun fight. While the left is demolishing Western Civilization here and in Europe he’ll be well-armed with something handy from Batman, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or Star Wars.

Forgie me if I decline to take him seriously

Douthat is not a utopian at all.

He’s an opinion journalist. He turns in copy on time, just like Daniel Larison. It’s just that Douthat’s employer has been commercially viable within living memory and Douthat himself does not write like he’s on a cocktail of psychotropics. Take them as seriously as you care to take people whose talent is in turning in copy on time.

Did you just say that if your political opponents don’t stop criticizing you, you feel entitled to shoot them? (Or merely that you intend to keep and bear arms, which you certainly can do today?)

No, I’m tempted to shoot them because they make crappy arguments, regurgitate talking points, play status games, lie, impugn other people’s motives / character / intelligence at the drop of a hat, and manifest personality problems.

I get that you were thick with the Neo-Cons and bought all the W corn.

He worked for Richard Lowry, whose entire career as an opinion journalist post-dates the period wherein ‘neo-conservative’ denoted a distinct tendency in starboard thought. Mr. Lowry was, quite briefly, a research assistant to Charles Krauthammer. That’s as close as he ever got to the Committee for the Free World.

Out here in the boondocks, most people I know are kind of enjoying all the sound and the fury. Trump isn’t as graceful as Ali, but he’s sure doing his version of rope a dope and float like a butterfly. . .sting like a bee. By the time people have jawed and chewed in outrage over some particular goof or slight, he’s already 3 tweets ahead of them. If the economy picks up, the doddering left will be shouting to an ever smaller crowd. It’s already a bit of an echo chamber. . .

Another article about how Trump has displayed mass incompetence and comparing him to a bunch of bogeymen… Of course the only problem is, no such thing has occurred. Yes, Trump is a novice and no doubt has done and will continue to do stupid things. But let’s try to get a grip here. He screwed up the roll-out of a reasonable program so bad that a couple hundred people out of several hundred thousand travelers were impacted. Oh dear…how ever will the United States survive? “Chaos” at airports, such as there was, was caused by the protesters and the media stirring them up.

I didn’t vote for Trump because I have serious concerns about his temperament/character and thought that he was just using social conservatives for votes given his background. But articles like this are just too convenient. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing Rod/Douthat were writing before the election, and they’re now conveniently proclaiming it’s starting to come true. These are people I respect and look up to, but they’re risking a future boy who cried wolf problem.

Look, Trump is going to screw something big up eventually. It’s pretty much a guarantee, especially considering that pretty much all of his predecessors (you know those guys with all that “elite” experience) have done so also. Obama – MILLIONS of people losing their health insurance and forced into more expensive plans, acting like a true autocrat when congress wouldn’t do what he wanted, forcing nuns to buy contraception. Bush – Iraq, Katrina. Clinton – Lewinski, failing to get Bin Laden. When Trumps commits his screw-up, you’re going to see a bunch of “I told you so” articles. The problem is, when these same people are “seeing” the chaos before it actually exists, it’s just not convincing. You’ll also see a big backlash against Republicans, but that’s pretty much baked into the cake as well given how divided we are as a country.

What I’m saying is, can’t we judge Trump based on the actual events as they unfold, especially given how wrong almost everybody has been about him so far?

“If we view a central goal of the policy not as preventing terror but as sowing terror, many of the seemingly irrational or incompetent features of its rollout begin to make more sense. The fact that it was indiscriminate, applying to everyone with citizenship from the seven countries regardless of their immigration status or history in the U.S. The fact that it was out-of-nowhere, affecting anyone who happened to be outside the country without any advance warning. The fact that its parameters were murky, suggesting to immigrants that even having made it through past forms of vetting was no guarantee of continued residence. It is certainly important to question the implied dichotomies (between “good” and “bad” Muslims, upstanding citizens and potential terrorists) that underlie many criticisms of Trump’s executive order. But it is equally important to recognize that the order itself also swept away these distinctions, from the opposite direction.”

We will either come apart, or we will unite around scapegoating Trump.

Rod, you are way too tied into the bubble. We will come apart, without question. War is upon us. The bubble people will try to unite around scapegoating Trump (already underway, so hardly a prediction, to be honest), but the rest won’t. Again, war is upon us, in all but the shooting.

You may not believe this, but there are Trump voters here in the People’s Republic of California and they are positively giddy with joy, finally a “man of action”…. so what if Ahmed grandma is stranded somewhere in Djibouti, they’re not real Americans after all

Unless he does something really, REALLY stupid or the economy takes a dive, it looks bad for the Dems

Re: War is upon us. The bubble people will try to unite around scapegoating Trump (already underway, so hardly a prediction, to be honest), but the rest won’t.

One name: Richard Nixon. He had his fans (my father was one and there’s an old gent at my church that still speaks well of him) and he had a landslide victory in 1972. But when his misdeeds became known the country as a whole was ready to see him go and his departure did not lead to any sort of strife, never mind it was at the end of one of the fractious eras of our history. Of course his successor was the genial Gerald Ford. Could Mike Pence play a similar role? I don’t know– but we may well find out.
And do bear in mind that there really aren’t that many serious Trump fans. He was elected by lots of people who held their nose and voted for him only with the greatest of reluctance; they won’t be shocked if he’s given the boot in favor of Mr. Pence.

One name: Richard Nixon. He had his fans (my father was one and there’s an old gent at my church that still speaks well of him) and he had a landslide victory in 1972. But when his misdeeds became known the country as a whole was ready to see him go and his departure did not lead to any sort of strife, never mind it was at the end of one of the fractious eras of our history. Of course his successor was the genial Gerald Ford. Could Mike Pence play a similar role? I don’t know– but we may well find out.

Gerald Ford wasn’t a particularly genial man. He was a standard-issue denizen of the Chamber-of-Commerce and the local country club. He got on well with the Secret Service and the chamber staff at the White House because he was moderately personable, unpretentious, and at home in guy settings. He was also salty and acerbic (“he doesn’t know his ass from page eight…I get so tired of this horses***”). Nixon was a socially-awkward bibliophile and the Carters were icicles to the people who protected and served them. (Carter was athletic, but, like John Kerry, his preferred sports were solitary pursuits).

And, of course, the Democratic Party is quite at home with abuse of power. The IRS told Nixon to take a hike when he wanted to sic them on a list of his political opponents and then, late in the Administration, leaked his returns. They happily did BO’s bidding and then successfully stonewalled investigations into the responsible parties. People like you lie about this in comboxes. The Democratic Party is a criminal organization and rank-and-file Democrats are content with that.

Please do not accuse anyone in these comboxes of lying. This is totally out of bounds as far as I am concerned. I have accused people of being seriously mistaken, of misremembering things, or exaggerating, of wearing ideological blinders, or at the extreme of making statements that I simply cannot credit for reasons of basic common sense etc. But never of lying. If you cannot rustle up an apology then I respectfully ask you never ti reply to any post of mine again here– and I will do the same with you. There is no point in dialogue where one party refuses to respect the other at all.

“We will either come apart, or we will unite around scapegoating Trump.”
Girard’s argument is that scapegoating no longer works because Christ revealed the innocence of the victim. So, coming apart is inevitable.